fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2330 ]

[ SECRET POST #2330 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2330 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

What are you guys' attitude towards retcons in fiction? Hate them? Okay with them? Like them in some genres and mediums but not others? Like only good retcons? Or always prefer to deal with things as they happened rather than retcon them away, even stupid stuff?

It kind of depends? As long as they're not really dumb and they're used in moderation, I'm okay with them. Obviously they're at best a necessary evil but I'm willing to go along with whatever the creator feels is necessary most of the time.

I don't really have a problem with retcons in fanfics because I view it as an AU.

But if it is a book or TV or movie or something it annoys the every loving hell out of me and will often lead to me stop watching because the story-lines no longer make sense *coughx-mencough*

I'm fine with minor ones that add details to previous events that make them more complicated than it seemed. But I don't like retcons that totally change the meaning and context of a past event and retroactively color everything that happened since and put it in a completely different light than how you perceived it before the retcon. Unless of course, the retcon is a massive improvement. But even then, I prefer the retcon's impact to be as narrowly tailored as possible.

*thinking of several examples from Marvel and DC comics atm...*

Ehhhh.... I don't know. I think writers should be aiming to create a good, coherent story in the first place, without having to retroactively change a bunch of stuff.

But, on the other hand, I can see how they can be good. But with remakes and the like, retconning stuff could be used to improve the original story, or write a better one.

(For example: I would really like to see a remake of the terrible sci-fi film "In Time" which starred Justin Timberlake. Mainly because the concepts were interesting - with better actors and a better story, it could have been SO much better.)

I'm okay with good retcons (like Hal Jordan never being a drunk who went to jail for 90 days is fine by me), am not okay with stupid retcons (One More Day) and am indifferent about minor changes, like Superman being an active hero as a teenager.

This all applies to comic books, by the way. When it comes to video game retcons, I tend to take them as they come, especially when a series is long running. For example, MGS2 claims that Big Boss was in his late fifties when he was cloned. Peace Walker makes that impossible by explicitly stating that he was 39 in 1974 (the cloning was done in 1972.) Also consider that Big Boss was depicted as actually pretty young in MGS3's 1964, but his age was never outright stated.

That being said, I don't like when some retcons are obviously done because a new guy running the franchise or whatever doesn't like it, such as IGA tossing Circle of the Moon and Legacy of Darkness out of the Castlevania canon for the sole reason of "well I didn't work on those and they suck." Nevermind that the immediate next game, Harmony of Dissonance, was of lesser quality to CotM!

I like them if I like the new status quo. I mislike them if I dislike the new status quo. I have no particular feelings about them one way or the other, if I don't care about the different status quo one way or the other.

How the retcon is achieved comes into it, too.

If it's not just a matter of just quietly ignoring the original story, how much I like the explanation of what REALLY happened of course affects my opinion of the retcon in general.

If it's a full on continuity reboot...If it's a new version of a property that's been moribund for a while, well, it's a new property, for all intents and purposes. If it's an attempt to save a failing property with a retool and relaunch one would hope for any loose plot threads getting tied up. If there's a Crisis Crossover type story to explain the reboot, my opinion on that comes into it, too.

tl;dr - It depends - if it's good, I like it, if it's bad I don't, just like any other story.

I have to take retcons on a case-by-case basis. I think it's a MAJOR change, there has to be an explanation, preferably an in-universe one (time travel rewriting a timeline/explicitly creating an AU, etc). The resulting scenario should still be consistent with the characterization before the retcon.

I hate them, yes. Especially because I'm yet to see one that is really clever, instead of just lazy, or a new writer wanting to do their own thing.

It depends on what's being retconned, and how they do it.

MTE. What are they retconning, and what are they replacing it with, are the determining factors.

Well, there are lots of reasons for retconning....

The ones that DON'T bother me are the accidental retcons of minor things, stuff like changing a character's age or the dates of certain events in their life because whoops, the creator didn't remember that they mentioned it previously.

I'm a little harder on retcons that occur because of a creative team change, or because the original creator decided they wanted to do something wildly different. The attitude of the people doing the retcon is a big issue--if the...uh...retconners believe that they're 'fixing' a problem or making a superior version of what came before, they come off as disrespectful and arrogant and often, the retcon itself ends up being polarizing or just plain bad. I mean...even if the original material was super crappy, if you are working with it, you should have some respect for it. :/

Eh... retcons can be great, so long as whatever they're retconning was a poor decision in the first place. If it was a good decision, not so much.

They tend to annoy me but sometimes, if the storyline is so messed up it would be worse to leave it like that, it's okay.

I actually wrote kind of an essay about this recently, since DC's current attitude toward retcons annoys the hell out of me. It boils down to "I like retcons that build and hate ones that destroy." If you think of continuity like a museum, good retcons are the ones that turn displays into new rooms, and bad retcons are like ones that blow up rooms or seal them off.

So like, I like Speed Force as a retcon for the DC speedsters, since it takes a bunch of scattered origin-story displays and builds a new wing for them and adds a bunch of new stuff. It builds. Whereas Parallax being a yellow fear bug demolishes several whole wings of canon, from Hal's character development to everything that was unique about Kyle. It destroys. (And then remodels the entire Green Lantern section to be about itself and its siblings.) The retcon of the National Comics character Quicksilver into Max Mercury dusts off an abandoned artifact from storage and makes it into new room. That builds. The Top being responsible for all of the Rogues' reformations, ever, obliterates not only several characters' growth but disrespects the optimistic, progressive mood of decades of comics. That destroys.

But I do think that you ought to have a really good reason to do even a "building" retcon, rather than throwing them around willy-nilly whenever the mood takes you. You have to stick with them for awhile, too, otherwise all the breaking and building makes the museum structurally unstable and nobody wants to go inside anymore (to push a metaphor too far). In general, I prefer in-universe solutions to story problems, but sometimes that's not possible, and sometimes retcons can be good. But they're just usually lazy solutions to lazy writing instead, and oftentimes a better story could have come out of dealing with the fallout of bad writing instead of waving it away.

TL:DR: A retcon should add more to the story than it takes away.

This is a really good way of looking at it! I'm not sure I 100% agree with it, because some building retcons are irritating too (eg, sometimes you WANT some things to stay vague and scattered), but overall I really like this idea.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2330 ]

Attitude towards retcons?

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